New websites come online at the rate of 10 per second

We've never started a column with a "Numbers Report" before. This is a frequent subject in our column but always placed well down. But some numbers have become so extraordinary in recent times, that they are worth talking about right up front. Such is the case with web sites.

How many web sites are there? No one can tell for sure because the number keeps changing so rapidly.

When we checked just a few minutes ago, right before starting this column, we saw that Google had searched 644 million sites. When we asked the same question five minutes later, Google reported it had searched 672 million web sites. It was adding sites to their own search engine while at the same time new sites were being created all over the world.

But that's just their universe as the statisticians say. The total number of sites available was just under 982 million — nearly a billion — and moving fast. We watched as new websites came online at a rate of about ten a second. Sometimes they jumped, coming in clumps of dozens. Google's lower number wasn't wrong, of course, it was just reporting how many they could search at that particular moment. We got the larger number from a website called InternetLiveStats.com, which has a running total flashing on the screen, sort of like those billboards you see sometimes flashing the national debt as it increases.

This is half way through 1914. The first ever web site was "info.cern.ch." CH is the country code for Switzerland; CERN is the giant nuclear research center there.

The first web site was put up on August 6th, 1991, by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN. He also invented the worldwide web. (Sorry, Al Gore; it wasn't you.) He basically put together all the features of the Web we know today, and then instead of trying to patent them, he opened it all up for free to the world. So what have the rest of us been doing these days? Next topic:

Get up and out there

If you want to get a website online fast, there are over a dozen services, that can do that, and many of them are free. We've used the free versions of "WordPress" and "Yola" to create web sites. Friends have raved about Weebly for producing new sites, so we tried it and must agree, it's very nice; it's also free.

Weebly starts by asking if you want a website, a blog or a store. If you're torn between choosing website or blog, here's a good rule of thumb: Blogs normally change daily, with new posts coming in all the time. They're typically for news sites; an organization or company would most likely prefer a regular website.

Sites created with Weebly can also be hosted on the web for free as long as you don't mind having "Weebly" in the website address. There are hundreds of designs already available but if you don't see anything you like, companies, such as DivTagTemplates.com, offer templates for $20 each, with advanced features like support for touch screen computers and tablets.

Online services like Weebly have one huge advantage over traditional website-building programs. They let you edit your site from any computer or smart phone, wherever you are and can connect to the Internet. You can also assign site editing to someone else without the purchase of additional software.

If you want more features than an online service offers, however, we'd recommend Xara Web Designer 10, $50 for Windows from Xara.com. It comes with free web hosting and the ability to make your site compatible with touch screen computers, tablets and phones. It's easy to use, and starts with a template you can alter. Changing theme colors throughout the site is as easy as clicking on a color strip along the bottom of the screen.

Some of Xara's special effects, like the ability to zoom into an image, are quite impressive, the kind of thing we see at big sites like Amazon. You can create a one-page "super site" for users who want to keep scrolling or swiping down the page without leaving it. Also nice: You can embed your Instagram photos in a gallery and make the pictures fade in and out as the user clicks on a button. Don't go nuts with this; we'd stop short at making your website's pages spin around as you go from one to another.

How long does it all take? In general you can create your own web site and be up and running in about a half hour. The more features you try to pump in of course, the longer it will take.

Facebook tip

Ever notice that the same Facebook friends are always at the top of your page? You can fix that.

Facebook notices when you comment on someone's post or click "like." It puts those people on top.

To change that, start liking or commenting on posts from people you rarely see. You can type a friend's name in the search box and go right to their posts.

Internuts

— FreeRice.com donates rice while you play a vocabulary game. (There's a bowl on the screen that fills up as you play.) The rice is paid for by the site's advertisers and distributed by the United Nations Food Program. In its first ten months of operation, the site donated over 42 billion grains of rice.

— LizardPoint.com has free geography quizzes. For example it was easy to find continents on the map and we did well at state capitols, but finding the regions of the Ukraine was much tougher.

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